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Social Movements: An Introduction, by Donatella Dells Ports and Mario Diani. Oxford & Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1999. 326 pp. $24.95 paper. ISBN: 0-631-19213-1.
From the 1960s onward, social movements, protest actions, and, more generally, political organizations unaligned with major political parties or trade unions have become a permanent component of Western democracies. The aim of this book is to introduce the reader to some of the principal issues raised by the growth of social movements.
The introductory chapter reviews briefly the four dominant perspectives in the analysis of social movements: collective behavior; resource mobilization; political process; and new social movements. As the chapter explains, the collective behavior perspective has drawn the attention of the analysts to collective action as an activity concerned with meaning. Resource mobilization stresses the importance of the rational and strategic components of seemingly irrational phenomena. Questions relating to the importance of the transformations that have occurred in industrial society can be explored through the new social movements approach.
The political process approach has focused attention on social movements as new protagonists in the aggregation and representation of different interests.
The introductory chapter has also defined social movement "as (1) informal networks, based (2) on shared beliefs and solidarity, which mobilize about (3) conflictual issues, through (4) the frequent use of various forms of protest" (p. 16). The authors argue that these elements will enable us to distinguish social movements from various forms of collective action which are...